Share-holders in clover

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Britain’s biggest companies handed out almost half a trillion pounds in dividends and share buybacks in the years before the coronavirus crisis struck, according to a report warning that the scale of the pay-outs has undermined their resilience.



According to research from the Common Wealth thinktank, around £400bn was paid in dividends and £61bn of cash returned to investors in share buybacks between 2011 and 2018 by the 100 biggest UK companies.

Analysing dividends for the 100 largest non-financial, UK-domiciled firms on a database managed by the credit ratings agency Moody’s, it found that payouts had steadily risen since 2011 and were equivalent to 68% of the companies’ net profits.



The study also found that 700 executives at 86 of the companies held a collective £6bn in shares at their firms, representing nearly £8.5m per director.



Mathew Lawrence, an academic, said: “Shifts in ownership and company rules have turned the corporation into an engine of wealth extraction for senior management and shareholders. Companies have become less resilient and more unequal as a result.”



As expected though the only proposals being offered is not system change but to “transform ownership to make business democratic and sustainable” – to fix capitalism, an impossible task rather than do away with it.



 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/400bn-paid-in-dividends-by-uk-companies-before-coronavirus-crisis

India’s forgotten health workers

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900,000 female community health workers are on the frontline as part of India’s battle against Covid-19. But they are poorly paid, ill-prepared and vulnerable to attacks and social stigma.



“The government is paying us 1,000 rupees ($13; £10) a month for corona-related work. That is 30 rupees daily for putting our life in danger.” says Alka Nalawade, a community health worker in the western state of Maharashtra. “The value of our life is just 30 rupees [less than $1], according to the government,” she adds. Ms Nalawade is among the state’s 70,000 Ashas, short for Accredited Social Health Activists. She is a single mother, and has been doing this job for 10 years now in Pawarwadi village, where she lives.  Ms Nalawade says, the compensation does not reflect the dangers she and her colleagues face.

Ashas are drawn from local and largely rural communities, and are a crucial element in India’s primary and community health programmes. They go door-to-door educating people about maternal and child health, contraception, immunisation and sanitation, as well as enrolling them in health programmes and monitoring the results. Their role in the fight against Covid-19 is not that different – they visit the homes they have been assigned, educate families about isolation, and monitor people for symptoms of the virus. But the risk is far greater than anything they have faced before. For one, they don’t have the right gear, including masks or sanitiser. 
Several Ashas told the BBC that they use cotton masks which they wash daily so they can re-use them – and for sanitiser, they have a bottle of spirit that they mix with water. One of them, Karuna Shinde, says she carries a scarf with her, which she uses to cover her face. 
Rajendra Yadravkar, Maharashtra’s junior health minister explains, “Ashas have been putting their lives in danger on a meagre salary. They should be protected. It’s the government’s responsibility to support them.”
They also face stigma for simply trying to do their job – people often stop them from entering their homes and make them stand outside while answering their questions for fear that the Ashas may infect them.
“We are working for the people, but if the same people are going to behave with us this way, what are we supposed to do?” asks Ms Nalawade.
The women also complain that they receive little recognition for their efforts.
“Nobody even mentions our work,” says Anjana Wankhede. “From the prime minister to the chief minister, everybody only praises doctors and police.”
She says that’s unfair since the government relies on the data that Ashas collect daily.
“We visit each and every household and provide these numbers to the government. The government talks based on these numbers, but they don’t talk about the Ashas who collect the numbers.”






Food Rots While People Go Hungry

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U.S. food pantries have faced unprecedented demand while billions of dollars in produce has gone to waste due to supply chain disruptions from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Farmers, without their usual foodservice markets, are being forced to dump milk, eggs, and produce—even while there is an urgent, unprecedented need at food banks. And while there are efforts underway to address the gap between production and distribution, in between are many questions about how our food supply and distribution systems are set up—or not—to respond to disruption.



 About $5 billion of fresh fruits and vegetables have already gone to waste, The Hill reported, citing the industry trade group Produce Marketing Association. 



 The group’s CEO Cathy Burns said that “there’s product literally wasting on the ground and then you have a whole population of people that are in dire need of nutritious foods. We have hundreds of thousands of farmers sitting on product,” said Burns. “Because they don’t have the financial means to ship and distribute it throughout the country, there is good, nutritious food going to waste while there are thousands of people going hungry.”



 Coronavirus-related lockdowns and business closures this year have led to “staggering” levels of job loss, roughly 22 million people have applied for unemployment insurance since mid-March. Those job and income losses have driven up demand for assistance from U.S. food banks and soup kitchens. In recent days, social media have been filled with images of people seeking help from food banks.



“This year, the COVID-19 crisis is driving more of our neighbors into food insecurity and putting a strain on food banks to provide more meals,” Feeding America CEO Claire Babineaux-Fontenot said. “Never has the charitable food system faced such tremendous challenge, and we need all the resources we can get to help our neighbors during this terrible time.”



Feeding America, the largest hunger relief organization in the United States, has a national network of 200 food banks. A recent survey of those food banks found that through April 1, 98% saw an increase in demand, 59% had less inventory, 67% needed more volunteers, 95% had higher operational expenses, and 37% faced “an immediate critical funding shortfall.”



“The only thing we can do is ration and give families less,” Eric Cooper, president of a food bank in San Antonio said of the rising demand for food aid. “I would challenge our federal government to put systems in place that allow for wasted food to go to families we are feeding. It’s unconscionable.”



Food distribution is falling apart, as is the medical equipment supply chain. It is time to do things differently. These developments should push people towards a fundamental rethink of how things are done. Tragically,  working people remain blind to other possibilities. The combination of both tradional and innovative farming techniques can feed the world, the internet enables global cooperation, robots will free people from the drudgery of physical and mental effort to benefit all.

Flint – Not Forgotten

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VICE have published an “astounding” and “important” exclusive report on how Rick Snyder, a Republican who served as Michigan’s governor from 2011 to 2019, “knew about Flint’s toxic water—and lied about it.”




The report, based on a year-and-a-half investigation, comes almost six years after an emergency manager appointed by Snyder switched Flint’s water supply from Detroit’s system to the Flint River. Since that move on April 25, 2014, city residents have endured health consequences resulting from a deadly Legionella pneumophila bacterial outbreak and exposure to heavy metals and cancer-causing contaminants. The waterborne bacterial disease may have killed at least 115 people in 2014 and 2015, and potentially more whose pneumonia wasn’t officially considered Legionnaires’ disease, the illness caused by Legionella. In addition to the outbreak, Flint’s water supply was contaminated with lead and other heavy metals, harmful bacteria, carcinogens, and other toxic components. This wreaked havoc on Flint residents, leaving them with a laundry list of illnesses, including kidney and liver problems, severe bone and muscle pain, gastrointestinal problems, loss of teeth, autoimmune diseases, neurological deficiencies, miscarriages, Parkinson’s disease, severe fatigue, seizures, and volatile mood disorders. Beyond this, the long-term effects of heavy-metal poisoning takes years to develop, meaning many ill residents’ conditions are worsening as the years go on.


VICE reveals a coordinated, five-year cover-up overseen by Snyder and his top officials to prevent news of Flint’s deadly water from going public—while there was still time to save lives—and then limit the damage after the crisis made global headlines. The report detailed actions of local and state officials both leading up to and during the public health crisis, which continues today. VICE noted that with Flint about to enter its sixth year of the water crisis, “the clock for justice is also ticking.” Unless the Republican-controlled state legislature intervenes, the statute of limitations for filing new felony misconduct-in-office charges will run out next week. 


Karen Weaver, then-mayor of Flint,  told VICE that the governor’s office repeatedly dangled “a pot of money for different things” and pressured her to publicly claim that the city’s water was safe. The outlet reported that “after repeated attempts by the Snyder administration to get Mayor Weaver to cooperate proved unsuccessful, the promised funding suddenly became unavailable.”




The report highlighted a few findings from the Flint criminal investigation documents:


Snyder was warned about the dangers of using the Flint River as a water source a year before the water switch even occurred.


Snyder had knowledge of the Legionella outbreak in Flint as early as October 2014, six months after the water switch—and 16 months earlier than he claimed to have learned of the deadly outbreak in testimony under oath before Congress.


Communication among Snyder, his top officials, and the state health department spiked in October 2014 around the same time state environmental and health officials traded emails and calls about the Legionella outbreak in Flint.



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/16/flint-water-crisis-enters-sixth-year-astounding-report-exposes-lies-ex-gov-rick

Camouflaging their Class

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As the top 1% of the population pulls economically further ahead from the rest, elites, it would appear, are keen to stress their “ordinariness” as they become increasingly sensitive to public opinion, and afraid of being labelled “snobbish, self-interested and out of touch”.



Researchers examining entries in Who’s Who and Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs  found a correlation between elites embracing the more common pursuits of football and pop music at the same time as rising inequality. Over the 120-year period, they found a significant shift from traditional aristocratic pursuits, such as hunting and opera, to more “everyman” interests of family and pets. The trend was particularly marked in the past 30 years.



The research  by Dr Sam Friedman, an associate professor at the department of sociology at the London School of Economics, and Dr Aaron Reeves, a senior research fellow at Oxford University’s department of social policy and intervention found elites were more recently adopting a blend of the highbrow and ordinary, suggesting an attempt to find commonality with the rest of the population, while still signifying their eliteness.



It was most clear from the 1990s onwards, said Friedman, “coinciding neatly with the continuing rise of the top 1%. Of course, this is only an association. Yet, we would speculate that these patterns may be connected. Put simply, as elites have pulled away economically, there is mounting evidence that they are increasingly insecure about their moral legitimacy, and increasingly sensitive to public concern they are snobbish, self-interested and out of touch.”



How elites presented their cultural lives had become a key PR battleground, he said. “Performing ordinariness may provide a very effective means of shoring up authenticity in an era of rising inequality.”



Friedman likened it to Boris Johnson declaring his hobby of making model buses during last year’s Conservative leadership campaign, “when he actually enjoys incredibly highbrow painting and Greek literature”, which he chose not to talk about.

Reeves said it mattered what people played on Desert Island Discs, which was an even more public performance of cultural identity. “Tony Blair famously convened a focus group – as he did for many things – to help him calculate what to play,” he said. Reeves said: “The move towards mundane and everyday leisure pursuits doesn’t necessarily mean elites are actually becoming ordinary, of course.”More, it revealed how they wished to present themselves. Researchers found traditional aristocratic recreations, like horse-riding and polo, were still mentioned alongside the more commonplace.



Elites were, perhaps, trying to forge a sense of commonality and connection, added Friedman. “And the way they do that is to try to cultivate a cultural profile that they feel looks like the ‘everyman’…”



Who’s Who has just 0.05% of the UK population featured.

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2020/apr/16/study-whos-who-suggests-elite-keen-to-convey-ordinariness




The United States – The “Wuhan of the Americas”

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US deportation flights to Guatemala are driving up the country’s Covid-19 caseload, according to the country’s health minister, who said that on one flight about 75% of the deportees tested positive for the virus.



Hugo Monroy said that the United States had become the “Wuhan of the Americas” 
“We must not stigmatize, but I have to speak clearly. The arrival of deportees who have tested positive has really increased the number of [coronavirus] cases,” he said on Tuesday. “There are really flights where the deportees arrive … with fever – and they get on the planes that way,” said Monroy on Tuesday. “We automatically evaluate them here and test them and many of them have come back positive.”
the presidential spokesman, Carlos Sandoval, told reporters that Monroy was referring to a March flight on which “between 50% and 75% of the passengers during all their time in isolation and quarantine have come back positive”.
he Guatemalan government had asked the United States to not send more than 25 deportees per flight, to give them health examinations before departure and to certify that they were not infected.
However, the flights resumed on Monday with 76 migrants onboard the first and 106 on the second. Guatemala’s foreign ministry did not immediately clarify why the US had not complied with its requirements. One of Monday’s flights also included 16 unaccompanied minors, according to the Guatemalan Immigration Institute.
Since January, the US has deported nearly 12,000 Guatemalans, including more than 1,200 children.




Saving the Street Childen

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For millions of street children, coronavirus restrictions have made access to food, water and shelter even more precarious. A global total of 100 million street children is often quoted, but the true number is believed to be much higher. As the pandemic takes hold across the globe, few groups are as vulnerable as the children who rely on the streets for food and shelter, who risk being further stigmatised and criminalised when cities lock down. Another fear is that the virus could drive homeless children back to families where they are at risk of abuse. Fear is mounting.



A teenager on the streets of Mombasa, wonders how he will eat. “Rich people can stay home … because they have a store well stocked with food,” he says. “For a survivor on the street your store is your stomach. The police have told us they don’t want to see us around after 7pm. Are we going to die of hunger instead of coronavirus?”



Bokey Anchola, country director for Glad’s House, an NGO working with hard to reach young people in Kenya. “Street children are having a rough time during the curfew. Food and water are a real problem as hotels and eating places where they would normally get food have closed down. Movement is restricted.” 



The closure of eating places, drop-in centres and feeding services, as well as the limits on movement, are just some aspects of a terrifying scenario for street children during the pandemic.  As small businesses have shut up shop in the lockdown, jobs that earned street dwellers a pittance, like carrying goods in markets or selling food to drivers, have vanished. Pavement dwellers are ordered to stay in makeshift structures and can not look for food. 



 Megan Lees-McCowan, head of Africa programmes at Street Child, said she feared Covid-19 would drive more children to the streets across Africa as schools shut and desperate families looked for alternative incomes.

“For us, there is also the spectre of the past,” said Lees-McCowan, recalling how during the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, some children were abandoned by destitute families, and shunned by communities that suspected they carried the disease.



  Duncan Ross, CEO of UK-based StreetInvest, says: “The vulnerability of this group will go up [in the crisis], their need for services will go up and isolation won’t protect them. The danger is that many people see them even more as diseased and criminal. Anecdotally, this is already happening.”



In South Africa, private security firms hired to clear the streets were taking homeless youth to temporary shelters that lack qualified workers to look after them. Mpendulo Nyembe and his team at uMthombo in Durban,  citing one encounter between a group of 11 youth and heavily armed guards. 

“They are terrified. We are terrified. The people dealing with them have no idea who these children are, of their backgrounds.”



“People’s survival is suddenly in jeopardy. Many families that live on the streets have been there for generations. They have no stocks and could starve,” says Paul Sunder Singh, founder of NGO Karunalaya in Chennai, India.



https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/apr/15/will-we-die-of-hunger-how-covid-19-lockdowns-imperil-street-children

Pills for greed or pills for need.

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The COVID 19 pandemic promises to have far-reaching and long-term effects in the future. The pandemic may trigger worldwide economic disintegration. But also there are signs evident of human solidarity and of collaboration, even of reorganising society, itself. 



The International Association of Health Policy analyzed the world’s response to the pandemic in a teleconference in late March. Vicente Navarro, a public-health academician based in Barcelona and Baltimore, summarized their deliberations, that, “several studies of recent years…had predicted that such a pandemic would occur and that the world was not prepared for it.” And, “states on both sides of the Atlantic have applied policies of privatization and cuts in public spending. The institutional base for providing services has deteriorated along with the quality of health and social services.”
Navarro and his group explained that “the biggest problem wasn’t a lack of resources, but the enormous inequalities in the availability of those resources. Therefore, it was a political and not an economic problem.” They pointed to “the minority interests of economic and financial groups that put profits for themselves above the common good.”
Capitalism now faces the deepest crisis in its several centuries of existence. Capitalism cannot escape from this crisis, no matter how many trillions of dollars governments borrow or central banks print. But nothing is clearer than the capitalists’ priorities – their stock portfolios come first and people’s desperate need for food, housing, water, a distant last. Under capitalism, disease is an immensely profitable industry, and pharmaceutical corporations excel at extracting enormous amounts of wealth. Of course, Big Pharma would have us believe that without their investments in scientific research, millions of people would not benefit from the medicine they sell. What system other than capitalism would encourage the  maximum profits so that Big Pharma investors can pursue high share prices and high dividends and another opportunity to swell their bank balances? Medicines that can be sold to wealthy consumers in developed countries, are fast-tracked, while drugs and treatments that might benefit the poorest billions are neglected.
 Human life is secondary to the pursuit of profits. This is why the chaos of the market must be superseded by a more scientific system of planning – a socialist system, where drugs are produced to meet the needs of humanity.

Mutual aid is alive. Everywhere people are working so that others might live and survive. The Socialist Party is striving to build a global community with a shared future for mankind. Our fellow-workers must acknowledge capitalism’s failures in dealing with the pandemic — and make the significant changes necessary for the security of our future. Could there be just the faintest glimmer of light at the end of this tunnel?



Extracted and adapted from here

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/16/covid-19-how-big-pharma-and-big-philanthropy-consume-the-world/



Inflation Returns

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The price of high-demand food and sanitary products has risen sharply in online shops over the past month as the coronavirus crisis mounts, according to official figures.



In an early sign of rising living costs across Britain during the pandemic, prices in a basket of high demand products compiled by the Office for National Statistics, which includes long-life food, toilet roll and cleaning products, increased by 4.4% since just before lockdown measures began a month ago.



Prices rose by 1.8% in the last week alone, driven by soaring pet food prices (8.4%) and a sharp increase in the cost of rice (5.8% ), nappies and hand-wash.



COVID-19 – Wanted, A Prescription For Socialism

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You don’t need the Socialist Party to tell you that coronavirus will change the world. Nor do you need politicians bought and paid for telling you that things will be fine in the end. The failures of the capitalist system and governments have been exposed. Many understand that there can be no “back-to-normal.”



The ultimate argument for capitalism has always been that at least it works while socialism remains untried and untested. Unfortunately, it is quite untrue. Profit, the feather-nesting for which capitalism exists, is irreconcilable with social well-being or simple efficiency. Whatever capitalism does is done with atrocious inefficiency. Can socialism do better? The cause of all the chronic dilemmas and idiocies of capitalism is organic: its structure on the class ownership of the means of production. There can be no hope of solutions or efficiency until this fetter is broken. Given its replacement by common ownership, social cohesion and planning of the environment we want become possible for the first time. Socialism is a world-wide community with common interests. Where the land, and all the means of production will be owned by mankind as a whole, with democratic control. Where the sole motive for production will be the satisfaction of your needs. Simply put — bread will be baked because people want to eat it — just that. Money will play not part at all in this society because there will be no need for money. Decisions by the community will be taken on their merits. The wages system will be abolished along with all the other stupid trappings of the present system. Socialism will be a system of co-operation; where each will give according to ability and take according to need. Mankind with its knowledge, harnessed to the riches of the earth, is capable of producing abundance. Why be satisfied with a world of shortages?


We should recognise that unless we get to the root causes of this pandemic, it’s going to recur, perhaps even in a worse form. Those who benefit from the capitalist system will re-create circumstances for a new pandemic.The pandemic can be a catalyst for change. In this unprecedented moment in history, many fear for the future but while we are going through a traumatic period of time, we should see this crisis as an opportunity to go forward to a new sort of society. We are living when events could engender a sense of reawakening of people-power. If we want to disrupt the inequalities that we are witnessing today that requires free access to the necessities of life as an indisputable human right for the benefit of all. That vision will become more and more a likely in the future. 



In times of of crisis and emergencies people reveal their true character and revert to their deep sense of community. Mankind is by nature a social animal. We need to be sociable; much of the disturbed behaviour one witnesses today is born of the fact that people have to compete to survive but it is in fact against our nature. Human nature is humanity’s hope, not its harbinger of doom.

Every part of our daily lives is restricted and determined by cost consideration and ultimately decided by the overall effect on the profits of the system as a whole. Whether it be houses, hospitals, health, or education, where the money is coming from is always the first question. Human need must come second in a society that lives on profits. The only possible solution is to change society. Socialism means a way of life where the whole world and its resources will be held in common by all mankind. A class-free world community with production solely for use and free access according to need. No longer will wages, markets and profits blight and restrict our lives. People will co-operate to produce an abundance — and then enjoy it.

We seek a system of society where every single person will be able to take freely from the store of social wealth whatever he or she needs. Such a system — which we call “free access” — means quite simply what it says: there will be no restrictions (such as are imposed today by the size of your wage-packet) on the amount of goods or services which any individual consumes, enjoys or uses. We maintain that an abundance of wealth, which such a system implies, could quite easily be produced if production were motived by the desire to satisfy people’s needs, not by profit as at present. Profit acts as a barrier to production, since if a thing cannot be sold at a profit, it will quite simply not be produced, no matter how many people would like it. And we have all read in the newspapers of fruit and so on, which has already been produced, actually being destroyed in order to keep prices up and to serve the interests of profit. Again, think of all the people (cashiers, ticket collectors, in short all those whose work is concerned with money) who do not produce socially useful wealth; under a system of free access their abilities, and those of countless others too, including those unemployed at present, could be put to producing goods which people really need. What we stand for, then, in this election as at all times, is a world-wide system of society where there is no money, no government, no war, and where the production of wealth for use alone, is democratically controlled by everybody.

We make no apology for introducing ideas such as these into this debate over the COVID-19 pandemic. We wish to change the system fundamentally, since this is the only way to solve the problems which both you and ourselves suffer from.




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